I am so happy to end my year on such a note as this! This will be my 82nd and final book review for the year 2020, and, I’ve got to be honest, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction might very well be my favorite book of the year. I never rank my books, by the way, so for me to say that is kinda something special. 

This isn’t my first book on reading, of course. I absolutely adored Lit! by Tony Reinke and One for the Books by Joe Queenan, but this book by Oxford Professor Alan Jacobs is a step up even from those. Through a series of essays (or were they at one time lectures?), Jacobs develops his thesis that education itself has hurt the natural-born reader’s desire for slow and patient reading. Such a desire can be neither faked nor forced, yet if someone had it then lost it, it’s possible for him to regain it once more. To such readers, he’s written this book.  

Because this book lacks chapters, it might be difficult to outline, but Jacob’s themes are unmistakable. I’ll share those here, followed by a few poignant quotes, and two small critiques.  

On the e-reader debate: As a Professor of Literature, Jacobs surprised me by discussing that even he hit a lull in his desire to read. He’d read books to prep for class, but his own leisurely reading suffered. And then he discovered the Kindle, and his whole reading life changed for the better (yes, you read that correctly). He adores the novelty (116) and the linearity of the technology that keeps pushing the reader forward without the distractions of unwieldy books or tempting glossaries (81). I’m sure he loves the view of his hard-copy library, but he’d be the first to tell you that books are made to be read not merely looked at. 

On reading recommendations: He isn’t willing to tell people what to read, and he’s staunchly against such lists that promise to delineate the fifty books one absolutely must read to be considered “a reader.” In what’s perhaps my favorite thought in the book, he writes: “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is the perfect guide for those who don’t want to read but who want to have read.” (68) Despite his aversion to recommending books, he writes: “If people came to me and said, ‘Here’s a list of ten of my favorite books—can you think of some others I’m likely to enjoy?’ I would be more likely—and better prepared—to answer.” (13)  

On choosing what to read: He offers “one dominant, overarching, nearly definitive principle of reading: Read at Whim.” (15) “In its lower-case version, whim is thoughtless, directionless preference that almost invariably leads to boredom or frustration or both. But Whim is something very different: it can guide us because it is based in self-knowledge—it can become for us a gracious Swiss pedagogue of the mind.” (41) He then goes even further in his discussion of the so-called “Great Books”: “Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame. And even if you are that rare sort of person who is delighted chiefly by what some people call Great Books, don’t make them you steady intellectual diet, any more than you would eat at the most elegant of restaurants every day. It would be too much. Great books are great in part because of what they ask of their readers: they are not readily encountered, easily assessed.” (23) 

On favorite authors and their inspiration: “If you imitate them in that sense—not by trying to write what they wrote but to read what they read—you’ll find your horizons expanding, your mind stretching, your resources of knowledge coming near their limits.” (46) “We can turn our temporal attention upstream rather than downstream—toward what preceded Tolkien or Austen or whomever rather than what succeeded them.” (43) Then quoting Rudyard Kipling: “It is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realizes how absolutely modern the best of the things are.” (46) For me, I discovered this when, as a soldier in the US Army, I sort of fell in love with Clive Cussler’s adventure novels. Rather than pursuing authors whom he had inspired, I sought out authors who had gone before him, authors like Alistair MacLean to Lionel Davidson to Geoffrey Household to H. Rider Haggard…on and on into the past for new adventures as suspenseful as anything authors put out today.  

On book reviews: This one touched me, for obvious reasons. “Even the reader who is critical in a constructive spirit is better, I think, than the reader who, however appreciative, is wholly passive.” (54) 

On growing as a reader: “People who begin by occupying their minds with small and trivial things can use what they know as a foundation, or a stepping stone, that allows them to ascend to higher things.” (91) 

On research and reading in education: “When you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should co-exist.” (112) I will most certainly use this as I continue through my doctoral journey! He continues: “Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about—I scruple not to say it—skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.” (114)  

Finally, on permissions: I always like these books about reading, because they describe the freedom I have as a reader to enjoy what I enjoy the way I want to enjoy it, without snobs lecturing me that I’m not doing it the “right way.” Nonsense. Like Reinke and Queenan before him, Jacobs offers his own freeing permissions to me through his own experiences: “I needed to learn…that if I set a book aside today that I am not thereby forbidding myself to return to it later—nor am I promising to do so.” (42) He later goes on at length to describe a Bacon quote and what it ought to mean to readers of all ages. Sir Francis Bacon wrote:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. (110)

Jacobs explains:

Bacon tells us such worried folks that they can’t read them all, and so should develop strategies of discernment that enable them to make wise decisions about how to invest their time. I think Bacon would have applauded Caly Shirky’s comment that we suffer not from ‘information overload’ but from ‘filter failure.’…Some books don’t need to be read with the patience and care I have been recommending here; at times it’s okay, and even necessary, to skim (merely to ‘taste’ rather than to ruminate. (111) 

Several other quotes from Jacobs and others stood out to me in this book: 

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction.(Michael Chabon) (35)

A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. (G.C. Lichtenberg) (53)

If you have ever read a passage and only later realized that you may not have understood it, and have therefore returned to reread it, you are a ruminant reader. (94)

I like all [novels] if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed. (Charles Darwin) (101)

Books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self. (116)

Those of us who pride ourselves on catholicity of literary taste find it difficult to admit that our range of appreciation has limits. (126)

Our goal as adults is not to love all books alike, or as few as possible, but rather to love as widely and as well as our limited selves will allow. (135)

And finally, two minor critiques, or rather points of disagreement. First, he emphasizes a great deal the joys of rereading. “Rereading a book can often be a more significant, dramatic, and, yes, new experience than encountering an unfamiliar work.” (128) I have never really felt that way about books. I have reread some. The book Alive by Piers Paul Read, for example, is a book I could read bi-annually, as with other desperate adventures like Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or anything about Endurance and Earnest Shackleton’s leadership. But the thought of sitting down to reread a novel I once enjoyed is a bit…depressing. Isn’t it true that there are only 10,000 books a person can devour in a lifetime? Wouldn’t it be better to Read at Whim by selecting whatever falls into my lap? I simply can’t see myself rereading a novel the same way I would re-watch a movie or even a TV series. There’s just too much time invested in such a review. 

Secondly, while I loved his comment about Sir Francis Bacon above, that we need to “develop strategies of discernment” when choosing what to read out of the plethora of books at our fingertips, I noticed that Jacobs hasn’t himself gone full-bore with such a strategy. He writes in the final pages of the book:

I used to try to determine in advance what books I would read over the summer, but eventually realized that to put any book on such a list nearly guaranteed that I would not read it. No matter how anxiously I had been anticipating it, as soon as it took its place among the other assigned texts it became as broccoli to me—and any book not on the list, no matter how unattractive it might appear in other contexts, immediately became as desirable as a hot fudge sundae. And over the years I have decided that this instinctive resistance to the predetermined is a gift, not a disability. (145) 

How one advocates for a strategy of discernment while also advocating for reading at Whim and an “instinctive resistance” to planning ahead one’s reading goals, I guess I can’t quite understand. But if that’s all I don’t get from this book, I’ll take it! 

I loved this book. I’m gifting immediately, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves books and reading, and whether that love is in the past or present tense.  

©2020 E.T. 

Check Out These Books about Reading:

• The Seven Joys of Reading by Mary Wright Plummer (1856)
• The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac by Eugene Field (1895)
• Figures of Speech by Arthur Quinn (1982)
• The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs (2011)
• Lit! by Tony Rienke (2011)
• One for the Books by Joe Queenan (2012)